Archive for the ‘post-war’ tag

As we’ve come to realize over the last few weeks, street scenes are often never merely collections of cars on a public thoroughfare. There was always a reason for the photographer to choose that setting at that time, and occasionally that combination results in an iconic photograph. Jazz writer and photographer William P. Gottlieb spent plenty of time on “Swing Street,” that section of West Fifty-Second Street between Fifth and Sixth avenues in Manhattan where many jazz clubs were located in the ground floors of brownstones, so it was only natural that he go outside and shoot the street in its entirety. However, as we can see from the Gottlieb photograph collection, now all scanned and uploaded to the Library of Congress’s photo archives, Gottlieb tried about a dozen times to get the shot he wanted – unusual for a photographer who carefully composed his shots so he wouldn’t have to use too much film.

The timing of the photographs would prove fortunate – shortly after, Gottlieb retired from jazz photography, and the clubs would begin to pull out of Swing Street, making July 1948 just about the peak of popularity for jazz in the area. All that said, though the night obscures many details of the cars in these shots, there’s still plenty of curves picked out by the neon. What do you see here?